Don’t blame the gay lobby for the decline of marriage.
By Stephen Baskerville
Defenders of marriage must face some hard facts or they are going to lose their fight—and with it, quite possibly, their religious freedom as well. Federal judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling nullifying Proposition 8 in California illustrates that, unless we can demonstrate very specific reasons why same-sex marriage is socially destructive, it will soon be the law of the land.
With conservatives as prominent as Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter joining those “influential Americans,” in the words of the National Review, who “have been coming increasingly to regard opposition to same-sex marriage as irrational at best and bigoted at worst,” we can no longer rely on vague assertions that homosexual marriage weakens true marriage in some way—which in itself, actually, it does not.
Considerable nonsense has been written by some opponents of same-sex marriage, while some critical truths are not being heard. Confronting the facts can enable us to win not only this battle but several even more important ones involving family decline and the social anomie it produces.
First: Marriage exists primarily to cement the father to the family. This fact is politically incorrect but undeniable. The breakdown of marriage produces widespread fatherlessness, not motherlessness. As Margaret Mead pointed out long ago—yes, leftist Margaret Mead was correct about this—motherhood is a biological certainty whereas fatherhood is socially constructed. The father is the weakest link in the family bond, and without the institution of marriage he is easily discarded.
The consequences of failing to link men to their offspring are apparent the world over. From our inner cities and Native American reservations to the north of England, the banlieues of Paris, and much of Africa, fatherlessness—not poverty or race—is the leading predictor of virtually every social pathology among the young. Without fathers, adolescents run wild, and society descends into chaos.
The notion that marriage exists for love or “to express and safeguard an emotional union of adults,” as one proponent puts it, is cant. Many loving and emotional human relationships do not involve marriage. Even the conservative argument that marriage exists to rear children is too imprecise: marriage creates fatherhood. No marriage, no fathers.
Once this principle is recognized, same-sex marriage makes no sense. Judge Walker’s “finding of fact” that “gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage” is rendered preposterous. Marriage between two men or two women simply mocks the purpose of the institution. Homosexual parenting only further distances biological fathers (and some mothers too) from their children, since at least some homosexual parents must acquire their children from someone else—usually through heterosexual divorce.
Here is the second unpleasant truth: homosexuals did not destroy marriage, heterosexuals did. The demand for same-sex marriage is a symptom, not a cause, of the deterioration of marriage. By far the most direct threat to the family is heterosexual divorce. “Commentators miss the point when they oppose homosexual marriage on the grounds that it would undermine traditional understandings of marriage,” writes family scholar Bryce Christensen. “It is only because traditional understandings of marriage have already been severely undermined that homosexuals are now laying claim to it.”
Though gay activists cite their desire to marry as evidence that their lifestyle is not inherently promiscuous, they readily admit that marriage is no longer the barrier against promiscuity that it once was. If the standards of marriage have already been lowered, they ask, why shouldn’t homosexuals be admitted to the institution?
“The world of no-strings heterosexual hookups and 50% divorce rates preceded gay marriage,” Andrew Sullivan points out. “All homosexuals are saying C9 is that, under the current definition, there’s no reason to exclude us. If you want to return straight marriage to the 1950s, go ahead. But until you do, the exclusion of gays is simply an anomaly—and a denial of basic civil equality.”
Feminist Stephanie Coontz echoes the point: “Gays and lesbians simply looked at the revolution heterosexuals had wrought and noticed that, with its new norms, marriage could work for them, too.”
Thus the third inconvenient fact: divorce is a political problem. It is not a private matter, and it does not come from impersonal forces of moral and cultural decay. It is driven by complex and lucrative government machinery operating in our names and funded by our taxes. It is imposed upon unwilling people, whose children, homes, and property may be confiscated. It generates the social ills that rationalize almost all domestic government spending. And it is promoted ideologically by the same sexual radicals who now champion same-sex marriage. Homosexuals may be correct that heterosexuals destroyed marriage, but the heterosexuals were their fellow sexual ideologues.
Conservatives have completely misunderstood the significance of the divorce revolution. While they lament mass divorce, they refuse to confront its politics. Maggie Gallagher attributes this silence to “political cowardice”: “Opposing gay marriage or gays in the military is for Republicans an easy, juicy, risk-free issue,” she wrote in 1996. “The message [is] that at all costs we should keep divorce off the political agenda.”
No American politician of national stature has seriously challenged unilateral divorce. “Democrats did not want to anger their large constituency among women who saw easy divorce as a hard-won freedom and prerogative,” writes Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. “Republicans did not want to alienate their upscale constituents or their libertarian wing, both of whom tended to favor easy divorce, nor did they want to call attention to the divorces among their own leadership.”
In his famous denunciation of single parenthood, Vice President Dan Quayle was careful to make clear, “I am not talking about a situation where there is a divorce.” A lengthy article in the current Political Science Quarterly is devoted to the fact—at which the author expresses astonishment—that self-described “pro-family” Christian groups devote almost no effort to reforming divorce laws.
This failure has seriously undermined the moral credibility of the campaign against same-sex marriage. “People who won’t censure divorce carry no special weight as defenders of marriage,” writes columnist Froma Harrop. “Moral authority doesn’t come cheap.”
Just as marriage creates fatherhood, so divorce today should be understood as a system for destroying it. It is no accident that divorce court has become largely a method for plundering and criminalizing fathers. With such a regime arrayed against them, men are powerfully incentivized against marrying and starting a family. No amount of scolding by armchair moralists is going to persuade men into marriages that can mean the loss of their children, expropriation, and incarceration.
The fourth point is perhaps the most difficult to grasp: marriage is not entirely a public institution that government may legitimately define and regulate. It certainly serves important public functions. But marriage also creates a sphere of life beyond official control—what Supreme Court Justice Byron White called a “realm of family life which the state cannot enter.” This does not mean that anything can be declared a marriage. On the contrary, it means that marriage creates a singular zone of privacy for one purpose above all: it is the bond within which parents may raise their children without government interference.
Parenthood, after all, is politically unique. It is the one relationship in which people may exercise coercive authority over others. It is the one exception to state’s monopoly of force, which is why government is constantly trying to undermine and invade it. Without parental and especially paternal authority, legitimized by the bonds of marriage, government’s reach is total. This is already evident in those communities where marriage and fathers have disappeared and government has moved in to replace them with welfare, child-support enforcement, public education, and tax-subsidized healthcare.
Marriage is paradoxical in a way that is critical to our political problems—and that causes considerable confusion among conservatives and libertarians. Marriage must be recognized by the state precisely because it creates a sphere of parental authority from which the state must then withdraw. Government today can no longer be counted upon to exercise this restraint voluntarily. We must all constantly demand that it do so. Marriage—lifelong and protected by a legally enforceable contract—gives us the legal authority and the moral high ground from which to resist encroachments by the state.
Prohibitions on homosexual marriage will not save the institution. As Robert Seidenberg writes in the Washington Times, “Even if Republicans were to succeed in constitutionally defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman, some judge somewhere would soon discover a novel meaning for ‘man’ or ‘woman’ or ‘between’ or ‘relationship’ or any of the other dozen words that might appear in the amendment.”
This is already happening. Britain’s Gender Recognition Act allows transsexuals to falsify their birth certificates retroactively to indicate they were born the gender of their choice. “The practical effect C9 will inevitably be same-sex ‘marriage’,” writes Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail. “Marriage as a union between a man and a woman will be destroyed, because ‘man’ and ‘woman’ will no longer mean anything other than whether someone feels like a man or a woman.”
So what is the solution? A measure already before Congress may show the way. Though not intended primarily to save marriage, the proposed Parental Rights Amendment is the first substantial step in the right direction. It protects “the liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children.” How does this strengthen marriage?
Reaffirming the rights of parents—married parents particularly—to raise their own children would weaken government interference in the family. Especially if worded so as to protect the bond between children and their married fathers, such a measure could undermine both the divorce regime and same-sex marriage by establishing marriage as a permanent contract conferring parental rights that must be respected by the state. Within the bonds of marriage, it would preserve the rights of fathers, parents of both sexes, and spouses generally, and it would render same-sex marriage largely pointless. Marriages producing children would be effectively indissoluble, and there would be fewer fatherless children for homosexuals to adopt. Men would come to understand that to have full rights as fathers they must marry before conceiving children, and they would thus have an interest in ensuring the institution’s permanence.
This is not a small undertaking. It would mean confronting the radical sexual establishment in its entirety—not only homosexuals but their allies among feminists, bar associations, psychotherapists, social workers, and pubic schools. It would raise the stakes significantly—or rather it would highlight how high the stakes already are. It would also focus public attention on the interconnectedness of these threats to the family and freedom. It would foster a coalition of parents with a vested personal interest in marriage and parental rights.
The alternative is to continue mouthing platitudes, in which case we will be dismissed as a chorus of scolds and moralizers—and yes, bigots. And we will lose.
Stephen Baskerville is associate professor of government at Patrick Henry College and author of Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family.
“without the institution of marriage he is easily discarded.”
i’m glad you added that, as i feared after the first sentence of that paragraph that i was about to read yet more codswallop about how men are “naturally” promiscuous or immature or whatever.
The irony is that gays will inherit the institution precisely at the moment it has ceased to mean anything, at least on a jurisprudential level. A marriage you can get out of as easily as you got into it is just cohabitation with a different tax status.
I don’t agree that fatherhood is simply a social construct, for isn’t fatherhood a condition for there being a society to construct anything? In any case using such language is a mistake; better to refer to fatherhood as a representation of the divine on earth (and given its importance, that’s hardly an overstatement).
Great article.
A very illuminating article. The problem is worse than indicated, however, because the defenders of traditional marriage are unaware of the weaknesses of the extremely influential Grisez/Finnis argument against same-sex marriage. I would like to offer a few not-so-brief considerations on that matter.
For starters, if marriage is “oriented to” procreation, as the new natural law (NNL) thinkers say, that is undoubtedly a good reason for excluding homosexual couples, but why aren’t sterile and aged heterosexual couples similarly excluded from marriage?
The NNL response involves reference to “generative acts,” or “acts of a generative kind.” The NNLers argue that sterile and aged heterosexual couples engage in acts of a generative kind, while homosexual couples are incapable of doing so. But the reference to a “generative kind” of act invites confusion. A much clearer formulation of *generative act* is “act of a kind that is (potentially) generative.”
Such a formulation makes it clear that the subject of “kind” is not “generative” but “acts.” And that spotlights a problem. The problem is that the sex acts of aged and sterile heterosexual couples are procreationless or non-generative. No child will be created as a result of the sexual acts of these couples. They can perform the act of conception (physiologically) but they can’t conceive (genetically), and while procreation involves both the act of conception and the capacity to conceive—physiology and genetics–it arguably is ultimately about the capacity to conceive. The long and short of it is that sterile and aged opposite-sex couples engage in necessarily procreationless sex, which is exactly the kind that homosexual couples engage in.
So why are sterile and aged opposite-sex couples allowed to get married when homosexual couples are not? It’s no answer to invoke the concept of biological complementarity, because that is relevant only with respect to reproductive functioning. If marriage is effectively about commitment rather than procreation—as it is for the couples in question—the requirement that the couples be biologically complementary is question-begging.
The NNLers appear to assume that marriage implies procreation. That seems to be what “oriented to procreation” means. But if so, it makes their justification of the disparate treatment of aged and sterile heterosexuals, on the one hand, and homosexuals on the other hand, look arbitrary. The marriages of aged and sterile heterosexual couples just do not fit under the umbrella of marriage-implies-procreation. Such couples can’t procreate, so how can their union be an example of procreation-implying marriage?
What the defenders of traditional marriage should assume, instead, is that marriage *presupposes* procreation. The natural meaning of this is that the institution of marriage presupposes the general fact of procreation. In conformity with this assumption, the intrinsic capacity to procreate can be considered a valid criterion of eligibility for marriage, where intrinsic capacity refers either to an actual or an ideal capacity. An ideal capacity to procreate is what sterile and aged individuals of the opposite sex would naturally possess, given the lifespan-optimal functioning of their reproductive organs. Such couples have an intrinsic capacity to procreate, unlike homosexual couples, and this is why it makes sense for them to be allowed to have civilly-recognized marriages. (Theoretically, lesbian couples have a capacity to procreate via advanced reproductive technology. However, the inconsistency and unfairness that this logically leads to—recognizing civil marriage for lesbians but not for male homosexuals—is a *reductio ad absurdum* that reveals the metaphysically and morally privileged status of natural procreation.)
The NNLers clearly regard procreation as important in understanding marriage, but how important? Is procreation important enough to be regarded as a necessary condition of marriage? Nowhere do the NNLers say that procreation is–or why it is–a necessary condition of marriage. As a result, they are unable to say that same-sex marriage is an incoherent form of marriage. All they can say is that is inadequate or improper as a definition of marriage—“mistaken” is the word used in an NNL-authored article prominently cited in the appellants’ brief in *Perry v. Schwarzenegger.* The intrinsic-capacity approach, in contrast, does show that same-sex marriage is incoherent. The implication is that making the idea of marriage incoherent is a serious harm to the institution of marriage—and that ominous rustling sound you hear is John Stuart Mill, the lifestyle liberal and the founder of the “harm principle,” rolling in his grave.
Unfortunately, the less successful argument against same-sex marriage (the NNL one) is favored by conservatives despite the fact that an argument similar to the one employed above was briefly discussed in the best of the dissents in the Goodridge case in Massachusetts, where it was called “theoretical procreation.” Chances are that the NNL argument will not convince the Supreme Court’s swing voter, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who authored the Court’s Lawrence decision, in which the amicus brief written by two prominent NNLers was simply ignored.
To be sure, a fruitful distinction might be drawn between being *generally* oriented to procreation and *necessarily* oriented to procreation, in which the first kind refers to presupposed-procreation and allows for certain exceptions (notably sterile and aged opposite-sex couples), and the second kind refers to implied-procreation. If the NNLers agreed that a general rather than necessary orientedness to procreation is what they really mean, it would save the idea that marriage is oriented to procreation, without anyone having to worry about stumbling over the fact that sterile and aged heterosexual couples are uncontroversially allowed to marry. But it would also make room for a rival conception of sexual morality in which the “natural” plays a key role.
The idea of natural ends fits well with presupposed-procreation. Presupposed-procreation involves the idea—far removed from the NNL focus on reasons for action (towards the apprehension of the good)—that the fact of procreation causes the institution of marriage to exist. The idea of natural causes, in turn, opens the door to considerations of natural ends in biologically-related contexts, such as procreation and the nature of marriage. (Insemination is natural to the male reproductive organ in roughly the same way that procreation is natural to marriage.) In the case of sexual morality generally (as opposed to the more narrow question of what marriage is), the NNLers would be directly forced to justify their apparently counterintuitive belief that, for example, contracepted sex by a married couple is just as morally bad as homosexual sex.
It makes a big difference across the board whether you hold that the intrinsic good of marriage provides a *reason* for (real) marriage or, very differently, that the general fact of procreation is the *cause* of the institution of marriage’s existence. I believe it’s the difference between most likely losing and very likely winning the battle over same-sex marriage—particularly the judicially-mandated kind of same-sex marriage. In the end, it will come down to the soundness—and practically speaking, the obviousness–of the reasons for allowing sterile and aged opposite sex couples to civilly marry while denying that legal recognition to same-sex couples.
Ken Zaretzke
All creatures in God’s creation are limited to the biological instincts of genetic imprint with some limited capability of learning alternate behavior, that is, except for man. Man has full RAM (random access memory) capability that can utilize an alternative operating software that can counter and control the hardwired ROM (read-only memory) of genetic imprint. It is this alternate operating software that makes civilization possible. Even the phrase “rule of law” is a formulation that can only be called religious because the only thing that science and nature can teach us is survival of the fittest, kill or be killed, for the advancement of the is the most successful gene pool of the physical animal.
The Christian faith holds that man is capable of being a moral creature, beyond instinct of the animal, and is to be held morally accountable. “God is no respecter of persons, Acts 10:34 — meaning all sentient humans are equal before him, from the greatest to least, and are equally accountable for their moral condition. Sufficiency of acceptance and internalization of some form of this idea constructs a framework of understanding that allows horizontal connection of confidence and trust between people of all cultures, races and national background that makes civilization possible.
The foremost Christian principle of morality is that life is more than the pursuit of the self. First is allegiance to God, commitment to family (yes, this requires personal restraint) church, community and country that establishes a very broad web of connection for the birth of children within this “village” of religious construction. This ” village” connects the children to the past: grandparents, uncles and aunts; to the present: parents, brothers, sisters and cousins; and to the future: children, nieces and nephews.
The censorial disapproval of traditional American culture to children born out of wedlock relates to the Christian ideal, that foremost of all children’s rights, is to have committed, responsible and loving parents — this over the right of adults to remain as selfish, indulgent adolescents taking license.
Of course, the social revolution of the 60s changed this idea to the pursuit of self: self-fulfillment, self-actualization, self-discovery etc. This essentially represents personal abandonment of responsibility of children to the state. And the state is utterly incapable of instilling that alternate operating software, which by definition, consists entirely of religious ideals. The offspring of this default often exhibit the state of nature of the feral animal. Gangs of males establish territory through violence, breeding with females within the territory that are left with sole responsibility of offspring.
While adverse biological conditions certainly affect a child’s future outcome, the abandonment of responsibility by adolescent adults has the most negative effect for children in America. In this kind of disordered society authoritarian authority is sought to bring about some order. This is possibly the reason for the attraction of Islam, with its emphasis on top-down coercive control, in the inner cities.
This is at once one of the most consistent, and yet one of the most bizarre arguments I have ever read on the matter. I think above all it speaks to just how radical an anti-same-sex-marriage stance has to be to make any sense whatsoever. In fact I think that the views given here might comprise just as radical a redefinition of marriage in contemporary society (that is, with regard to what people who are entering into marriage expect from it) as any argument in favor of gay marriage; and I suppose maybe that’s the point.
Another Matt – I thought this was an incredibly bizarre argument as well, until I did a little research into the history and philosophy of Patrick Henry College. From the point of view of a Dominionist Christian (read: Theocrat) , this argument makes perfect sense.
I really think a lot of these arguments misread the most simple reasons gay people want to get married. I proposed to my wife because I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. We’ve been together 15 years and married 5, and we have yet to decide whether children will be in our future — procreation was the last thing on our mind in 2005. But that I get to call her my wife and she gets to call me her husband, and that other people recognize that as a commitment, is what is important. The traditional Hallmark card marriage vows say nothing about procreation — they say, “you guys, she’s not just my girlfriend anymore.” Whatever the morality of it, I’m fairly sure that this is what gay people who want to marry want out of the deal — of course, with every legal benefit.
I think the central reason gays want to get married is not because of complex social forces mentioned in this article. I think the central reason they want to get married is simple: money.
Our society bestows upon married partners a number of significant monetary benefits. Here are a few of them: the $1 million marital death tax exclusion; the right to be covered as a “family member” on group insurance policies; preferential federal income tax rates; spousal Social Security benefits, and spousal pension benefits.
Remove the preferential financial benefits that married people enjoy as compared to single people, and I believe the desire of gays to become married will significantly wane.
this is a heady read, and I don’t necessarily disagree with some of the sociological implications.
But what ever the social and religious significance of marriage, when the state sanctions and regulates marriage, and defines responsibilities and benefits accordingly, then it is no longer merely a social or religious construct.
The state’s role in marriage then makes it a regulatory and contractual institution. Therefore, the state’s role must be administered blindly, without respect to gender–just as it is blind to the religion–or lack of religion–of who it bestows a marriage certificate to.
The USA has one of the highest divorce to marriage ratios (rate) in the world of about 190 countries.
The federal government gives money to State and County governments to create dead beat dads (support order, arrearage orders, collections). Up to $4,300,000,000 is paid from Social Security fund…our retirement accounts.
http://www.ssa.gov/OP_Home/ssact/title04/0458.htm
Though my friends and a brother were legally innocent, a government employee (judge) took the men’s children, eighteen years of incomes, and most of their stuff, then left them with legal and marital bills in a divorce they did not want.
Stephen, well said again. Many people, today, will not understand what you write at first glance without further study of how and why marriage was instituted in the first place, which will then lead then to understand your article. Those of us who grew up pre ‘no-fault’ have the ability to understand real ‘traditional marriage’ much easier.
People get married because of love. Well, what is love? That is the first thing that must be understood, otherwise, we fall in and out of love, just like the waning and waxing of the moon.
Maybe we need laws that make marriage a ‘privelage’ and not a right unless both parties enter into to it with full consent that it will be lifelong and that if, problems arise, then certain steps must be taken before divorce is granted and only in rare cases can it be granted. Otherwise, forget marriage and become a used car salesman.
When the divorce is between same-sex couple, who will the judge discriminate against?
The state’s role should be administered blindly, as Alan points out. Unfortunately, it rarely is, but in ways that are different than the one he suggests.
Too often the state peeks out from underneath the blindfold of justice to confer benefits on the mother at the expense of the father, for the purpose of protecting the state’s interest — to keep the mom off of welfare, for example, or to maximize child support payments so state and local governments maximize federal kickback payments from Social Security.
http://www.ssa.gov/OP_Home/ssact/title04/0458.htm
The real problem in marriage and divorce is the state and its gender biased family court system.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by AmericanConservative, David Lindsay. David Lindsay said: Defenders of traditional marriage need better arguments – http://www.amconmag.com/blog/divorced_from_reality/ [...]
An outstanding article. The argument about marriage and fatherhood is one of the strongest, simplest, and least offensive (in terms of not simply being “anti-gay” while ignoring the shenanigans of so-called conservative multiple divorcees) that I’ve had the pleasure of reading. Thanks.
So, I am all for something removing the rights of non-married fathers
but thats because I have a very irritating one constantly using my baby as a self-indulgent play thing. I also agree that fatherless-ness is so incredibly detrimental to society. Watching Charlotte gain a father, after having been dealt such a crappy hand the first go-round, has been the most enjoyable experience of my life (even if it means cleaning up after two people who act like 3 year olds) haha.
That being said, most of the gay couples I know have been in committed relationships much longer than the rest of us, and would make much better parents than most of the heterosexual couples I know, because they are far more committed (no accidental pregnancies there) and usually do have to go through the long and tedious process of adoption to make their family a reality. Like straight couples, it takes only a very family oriented and committed couple to even want to embark on the marriage+child rearing track in the first place.
Lets talk about something, in my opinion, that is truly terrifying and that is the gay man lying to himself, marrying a woman, producing offspring and then leaving her with the bulk of responsibility and his own ability to gal-avant about town for the rest of his life and only see his children once a month. I have seen this more than gay couples trying to adopt kids. Why does this even occur? Those kids are very much at a disadvantage. It is a doomed marriage from the get-go.
In my opinion, if it were socially acceptable for gays to marry and have families, we would be increasing the likelihood of the father figure staying in the child’s life as a prominent role, instead of a weekend daddy. At least to the same level as exists in straight couples today. And that should be our goal. Increasing the two parent stable household. Irrespective of sexual orientation. And in a two woman household, I’m not sure the risk of abandonment is even as high as it is in heterosexual marriages.
What I think is happening with marriage in this country is that our expectations that the other person is some magical perfect match who will love us unconditionally forever is delusional! We have all been programmed by the movies and television to see marriage as this hilarious Rom-Com. That is not what it is at all. At least not in my experience. Sure there is laughter and funny times, but there is total frustration and anger and ‘why wont you help more’ and ‘who is going to do this, neither of us want to, whose going to take this hit this time.’ I mean, the expectations are warped. If the message being sent out to both gay and straight couples is DIVORCE destroys children’s identities and self esteem, so get some therapy and work on making yourself into a better person because nothing can replace a child coming home and seeing both parents there supporting them and each other, then we will have a much happier healthier country, irrespective of denying rights to people who truly feel they were born attracted to the same sex. I certainly don’t think they are any less capable of the task at hand than straight couples.
I try to think, if my son were gay, what would I want for him? The opportunity to show the world that his mom and dad taught him about commitment, problem-solving, kindness and how to raise a family. I certainly wouldn’t want him to miss out on the truly rewarding experiences in life, just because he was attracted to the same sex.
My other worry, is that people who vehemently oppose same-sex marriage may be doing so based less on the existing information on its functionality and more on a religious conditioning. The small voice in the back of their head screaming, ‘this is wrong.’ I think we can all agree that there have been many times throughout our life, when we were convinced of something due to brain-washing or the repeating of a lie until it became the truth. While I can see that religion can play an important role in the development of ethical boundaries, I, in general, find that applying religion to remove a persons rights or ostracize them from society based on a quality they possessed at birth is truly archaic and should never be encouraged.
In my opinion, it is just another form of discrimination that brings us farther away from truly unifying as a species. Which, if I have read any of the religious texts accurately for the ‘big picture’ is indeed the ultimate goal.
The debate has generally centered around fighting over what is the definition of marriage: conservatives claiming that it is defined as the union between a man and a woman, liberals claiming that it is defined as a consensual agreement between two people who love each other. Both sides think that they can declare victory based on their definition alone, and both sides convince no one who already wasn’t convinced. The question we must ask is not what is the definition of marriage, but what is its function. Functions do not depend on definitions. The function of the heart is to pump blood no matter how you define it. This answers Ken’s concerns above about non-procreative unions because this objection highlights the difference between teleological approaches and definitional/essentialist ones. The main difference is that an item can have a teleological function and yet never perform it, whereas essential characteristics must always be present. For example, the fish swimming in a fishtank, let us suppose, have certain innate behavioral mechanisms whose function is the avoidance of predators. But because of their present environment, these functions will never be performed. Or a coffee maker may never actually be used to make coffee, although it could if was given the right inputs (assuming the rest of it is in working condition). So the objection that marriage can have nothing to do with childbirth since there are many heterosexual couples that never have children is assuming an essentialist argument that does not apply when approaching it teleologically. Heterosexual couples are in this position, they could perform the reproductive function even though they don’t, whereas homosexual couples could never perform this function.
“The foremost Christian principle of morality is that life is more than the pursuit of the self. First is allegiance to God, commitment to family (yes, this requires personal restraint) church, community and country”
as long as it’s clear that ‘country’ is not an inherent chrisitian allegiance as the other four are.
“So the objection that marriage can have nothing to do with childbirth since there are many heterosexual couples that never have children is assuming an essentialist argument that does not apply when approaching it teleologically. Heterosexual couples are in this position, they could perform the reproductive function even though they don’t, whereas homosexual couples could never perform this function.”
Except in the case of adoption, insemination, surrogate childbirth, etc. You’re just putting the definition problem up a level — instead of defining the thing you’re defining or cherry-picking its function. The function of the heart is also to stop beating at death, or in the case of some domesticated animals, to taste good in giblet gravy. You could argue just as easily that the function of marriage is to provide stability and a loving environment to a household and then point to all the abusive relationships and unstable marriages and say that while they COULD perform the loving stability function they just aren’t in this case. Also, your argument fails with infertile couples because they COULD NEVER perform the reproductive function by the very definition of infertility.
In any case your argument has nothing to do with the issues of justice involved with prohibiting gay marriage.
Perhaps some of the confusion comes from thinking of marriage as a right, when it is better understood as a duty or even an act of piety. (One hardly needs to be married to love someone, especially if you limit love to its erotic form.) What does it mean to have a “right” to be obligated to another person for life? And without such obligation, in what sense is a marriage different from a temporary sexual cohabitation–besides the name, of course? The question is not why can’t gays “marry”, but rather why anyone should be married at all.
Two things are clear: 1) a society with no marriage ends in political chaos, and 2) the marital franchise is necessarily discriminatory. We are naturally tempted to deny, theoretically or in practice, one or the other of these truths. The more you try to get around (2), the closer you get to (1).
Most of the arguments for gay marriage above, though clever, prove too much: under their premises incestuous, pederastic, polyamorous, bestial, or even delusional (“I want to marry my bonzai tree”) unions would enjoy equal “rights” without any attendant obligations. Relationships thus become subjective and conceptual, while the pressure of learning how to live with other people in close proximity deflates.
Gays aren’t winning the right to marry; they’re winning the right to a divorce. Congratulations.
Texas better get on board if they don’t want to be the laughing stock of America. Kind of hard to boast of your conservatism, when you cannot even understand the fundamentals.
“And much of Africa…”
Not true of non-Muslim Africa.
Whoops! I meant the opposite! Not true of Islamic Africa.
Another Matt,
Infertile couples by definition have something wrong with one or both of their reproductive organs. In the case of a gay couple, they both could be sexually healthy and incredibly fertile. Yet they will never be able to produce an offspring. In one case, something has gone wrong biologically, in the other it is a biological impossibility.
Another issue is adoption. When an infertile couple adopts a child, unless one is told, in many cases one would not know that the child is adopted. This could never be the case with a gay couple as same-sex couples cannot under any circumstance bear children together.
The problem with “gay marriage” and “gay parenthood” is that they run counter to basic biology. As such, they are complete fictions cooked up by the ideologues of the sexual revolution. Those who advocated it arguably have a problem with science.
The writer “Lauren” mentions quite a few cliches about gay couples that when investigated thoroughly are downright false. Popular media promotes the idea that gay couples are pretty much like straight couples. In fact, they are nothing like straight couples.
About fifteen+ years ago two gay gay researchers published a study on gay couples that showed them to be very different from their straight counterparts.
First of all, they found that only 10% of gay men had had a committed relationship that lasted more than two years.
Gay couples that had been together for significantly longer periods had a relationship with one particular defining characteristic, a decided lack of monogamy. Men in these long term “committed” relationships were found to have had a surprisingly large number of outside sex partners during the term of the relationship.
In fact, the two researchers found that the insistence on monogamy that is considered a key to the success in a heterosexual relationship was a recipe for disaster in a gay relationship. Strictly monogamous gay relationships were doomed to fail because of the the temptations of very casual, virtually anonymous, and very plentiful gay sex were just too tempting.
After all, while heterosexual men have to put some effort into finding willing female sexual partners, gay men often have to look no further than the local men’s room or bathhouse. No wining or dining required!
The question arises as to whether society wants to give gay relationships the same status as heterosexual relationships considering the overwhelming acceptance of promiscuity of in the gay community?
I have a serious question: once we re-define marriage as a mere contract between any consenting adults who really, really love each other, what is to prevent bigamy, polygamy, or incest? Didn’t early Mormons die over their definition of marriage as between consenting (multiple) adults? Pat Buchanan gave the most succinct argument I’ve yet heard on the matter several years ago on the McLaughlin Group: “John, the whole idea of two men getting married is ridiculous.” Family law codes say nothing about “love,” despite what do-gooder young college students might wish to be. Marriage is social obligation, and the idea of separating it from gender is Orwellian and absurd. Bear in mind that homosexuals already have the exact same right to marry as heterosexuals anywhere in America. Any two homosexuals can get married anywhere- as long as one is a man and one is a woman.
“Most of the arguments for gay marriage above, though clever, prove too much: under their premises incestuous, pederastic, polyamorous, bestial, or even delusional (“I want to marry my bonzai tree”) unions would enjoy equal “rights” without any attendant obligations. Relationships thus become subjective and conceptual, while the pressure of learning how to live with other people in close proximity deflates.”
This might be true only about polyamory (and possibly incest in some cases). The others fail to meet the criteria required for consensual contract. Honestly I fail to see why polyamorous relationships should be curbed as far as the state is concerned, and even some relationships that would be considered incestuous whether or not they were sexual. In fact, if my parents had died in a car accident five years ago and my 18-year-old brother and I moved in together for those five years to finish raising our 13-year-old brother, it seems to me that that temporary relationship ought to be afforded the same tax breaks and attendant rights as a marriage. Ditto the brother and sister who make a household in their 80s when their respective spouses have died. I don’t much care what one calls such a relationship — the only important factor here is how it is treated by the state.
“Infertile couples by definition have something wrong with one or both of their reproductive organs. In the case of a gay couple, they both could be sexually healthy and incredibly fertile. Yet they will never be able to produce an offspring. In one case, something has gone wrong biologically, in the other it is a biological impossibility.
Another issue is adoption. When an infertile couple adopts a child, unless one is told, in many cases one would not know that the child is adopted. This could never be the case with a gay couple as same-sex couples cannot under any circumstance bear children together.”
Your criteria seem arbitrary — one could find a million differences between one couple and another.
“The difference between a Christian couple and an atheist couple is that the former will likely raise Christian kids. Therefore atheist marriage makes no sense.”
“The difference between a couple that makes $100,000 a year and one that makes $10,000 is that in many cases nobody would be able to tell that the former’s kids had comfortable parents, while it would be obvious with the latter that they’re poor. Therefore poor people shouldn’t get married.”
Et cetera. These count as observations, not as arguments — they have not earned their “therefores.”
“The problem with “gay marriage” and “gay parenthood” is that they run counter to basic biology. As such, they are complete fictions cooked up by the ideologues of the sexual revolution. Those who advocated it arguably have a problem with science.”
Um, by this logic all adoption runs counter to basic biology, as does single parenthood. They’re “complete fictions.” In reality, part of the point of this article is that marriage itself runs counter to “basic biology” which is why it requires such careful stewardship. And anyway biology is concerned with what is observable, not with how things should be. “Is” does not imply “ought.”
Another Matt, I was not cherry picking its function. The possession of a function is not an arbitrary matter, and no, it is not the function of the heart to stop beating at death. Functions are determined by reproduction and selection: when something is reproduced because it has a certain effect, that is its function. Hearts are not selected by natural selection because they stop beating at death, they are selected for their ability to pump blood. This is an entirely natural phenomenon and not dependent on how we might assign a thing a function. Aristotle thought that the function of the brain was to cool the body. He was wrong, no matter how you might define it.
My argument has everything to do with the issues of justice involved with prohibiting gay marriage since we consider it just to exclude people from functions they can not perform. If you can’t perform the functions of being in the army, we don’t consider it unjust to prevent you from joining. Likewise, it is not unjust to prevent those unable to perform the marriage function from marriage.
Another Matt:
I’m not sure why you think the state curbs polyamorous relationships. Perhaps you mean it doesn’t support them through tax breaks or mandatory insurance eligibility.
Consent is not the hard and fast line that you think it is. In the case of pederasty and incest, consent can be leveraged or manipulated through gifts, emotional manipulation, or threats. Legal authorities would have a very hard time telling the difference, especially if the very concept of consent is accused of being an arbitrary construct hailing from an antiquated morality. If consent cannot be defined except subjectively, then the presence of an implied contract can be assumed–for instance, if you and your dog have sexual relations.
Again, the question is not whether people are kept out of marriage, but under what circumstances and for what reason should they be kept in. I assert that a marriage that is as easily exited as entered is nothing more than cosmetic.
How about legislating to allow couples to register their marriages as bound by the divorce laws that were in place before no fault divorce (pioneered by Ronald Reagan in California) was introduced?
Paternal authority and responsibility require an economic basis such as only the State can ever guarantee, and such as only the State can very often deliver. And that basis is high-wage, high-skilled, high-status employment. All aspects of public policy must take account of this urgent social and cultural need. Not least, that includes energy policy: the energy sources to be preferred by the State are those providing the high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs that secure the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community. So, nuclear power. Coal. And drill, baby, drill.
And it includes foreign policy, in no small part because those sent to war tend to come from working-class backgrounds, where starting to have children often still happens earlier than has lately become the norm. Think of those very young men whom we see going off or coming home, hugging and kissing their tiny children. Yet our society urgently needs to re-emphasize the importance of fatherhood. That authority cannot be affirmed while fathers are torn away from their children and harvested in wars. You can believe in fatherhood, or you can support wars under certainly most and possibly all circumstances, the latter especially in practice today even if not necessarily in the past or in principle. You cannot do both. Which is the conservative position? Which makes present in the world the Fatherhood of God?
The argument for same sex marriage is the endowment factor. I have have seen too many partners suffer the indignation of being told legally they have no rights under the law to their partners interests whether personal or financial. It also applies to both hetero sexual and homo sexual interests without the ‘marriage label’. The marriage argument is defunct yet remains a legal term of sexism at best. As the time no fault divorce became part of a commercial agreement so marriage effectively ended as an institute as would be the social construct for procreation of stability for offspring. Reducing the effective familial legal interests to commerce and state policy.
In defining marriage we must define the institution for what it was. Quite simply a matriarchal state of procreation, not patriarchal in any argument, while also a hands off institution for any method of usurption whether law, religion or state policy. That is no longer a factor in play with the states and legal determination to control of the marriage bed, with all the necessary policy, funding and politics necessary to achieve this outcome. We must also look at the criteria and slew of agents and agencies placed with incentives to make this institution a memory of purpose. We further look into the human historical development and it’s purpose. It is evidently a construct of social community and approved for procreation status to individuals. We look at two of the marriage commitment sentences, ’till death do us part., and ‘whosoever objects do so now or forever hold your piece. (variants). In the old ways in baronships, and fiefdoms we mere peasants were simply bred for skill sets and standing armies. In the modern world human husbandry has changed little other than words used. The public debates or publications of Stephen Baskerville touch little on the subject, it’s purpose and ultimately it’s outcome from the simple sense of policy determinations by state. (www.powerkills.com) The demise of community goes hand in hand with the demise of marriage with legal subjugation. (Balfort Bax- The subjugation of men). In looking historically at cultures that have taken the path the US now takes, we find that those cultures failed due to the indulgencies of it’s administration to the hierarchical structure. However in the present day case we have age old doctrines reenacted on a scale of commerce never before seen. With it also comes the risk of it’s effects.
In simple terms we do not need breeders or families of breeders (or the institute of marriage) anymore, and we certainly do not need males. In the pursuit of the ultimate in individualism, we reduce ourselves individually to contract on emancipation within our state of origin. Quite simply an individual agent capable of involuntary or voluntarily tort and contract with othe rindividuals that are not incorporated. The way of commerce has it’s own path, which is simply reductionism for maximizing productivity. In the words of the elite we do not need any more philosophers, artists, writers, scientists or even teachers. We need lots of politicians and political workers who may fudge these issues and avoid their purpose. We also need a system of law that is to all effects and duly obtained subject to commerce by the creation of absolute administration. We have at this point two states of political arena’s, the real and the percieved(or presented). The administrative level is the major player and needs to march on with it’s policies enacted after WWII. In the words assigned to Brock Chisolm, ‘It is important to remove from minds of men their sense of religiosity, familialty and dogma……’,
Less than two weeks from now (on December 6), the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals begins oral arguments in the Prop. 8 case, which unlike previous court cases on same-sex marriage is going to be about federal law (DOMA), not just state law. I am pessimistic about the eventual outcome of this case, called Perry v. Schwarzenegger. Of course, the 9th is famous for being overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court. But it seems to me that much will depend on the kind of rationale the Ninth Circuit court gives give for its almost certain pro-same-sex marriage decision. If the same rationale is trotted out this spring (presumably in June) as in the trial court last spring, the appeals court will practically be inviting the Supreme Court—that is, Justice Kennedy—to overrule them. Anthony Kennedy loves such things as autonomy, the dignity of the individual, moral personality, and all that, but I doubt he will use any of it to find a fundamental right of same-sex couple to marry under the Due Process clause—as Judge Walker did. It’s too much of a stretch. Unfortunately, the appellants’ brief focuses on Due Process and ignores the possibility that the court will rule on Equal Protection grounds.
As I understand it, strict-scrutiny equal protection has two prongs—fundamental interest and suspect classification. The immediate strategic goal of the appellants appears to be to show that only a rational-basis test would be proper (and very likely satisfied, given that Prop. 8 can’t simply be attributed to prejudice, at least by non-morons). But in focusing on due process claims, the appellants’ brief (which I admit I have not read very thoroughly) makes no attempt to remove from judges’ minds the idea that a fundamental interest under the Equal Protection Clause is at stake. As far as that goes, it might not really matter. It would be strange and extremely divisive politically to treat homosexual marriage as a fundamental interest given the history of every civilization we know of. So no serious worries there, unless you think Justice Kennedy, a Republican appointee, will want to be a hero to liberal intellectuals while also helping elect Republicans for decades to come, as Roe v. Wade inadvertently did. Regardless, the appellants’ brief (written by my former Department of Justice colleague Charles J. Cooper) seems not to even consider the possibility that a suspect classification may be found to lie behind an equal protection challenge to the ban on same-sex marriage in California–and because of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, in the entire country.
The suspect classification would not be driven by the relatively delegitimized status of homosexuality in general, for homosexuality is regarded by the vast majority of Americans as nowhere as morally legitimate as heterosexuality. Rather, the suspect classification would be driven by something that the appellants’ brief tends to underrate. And that is the apparent inconsistency posed by the disparate treatment of same-sex and opposite-sex couples with respect to the precondition of marriage—namely, procreative capacity. The new natural law argument, on which the appellants’ brief seems to rely, does not quite remove the inconsistency, because at most the new natural law argument only offers one plausible view of the meaning of procreation (a physiological one) while ignoring a no less plausible, and arguably more plausible, view of what procreation means (a genetic one). The judges are likely to find such an account one-sided or question-begging. So, if they are liberals or moderates they are all too likely to find a suspect classification that in effect powers up strict scrutiny.That will be disastrous, not because there is no compelling government interest in traditional marriage, but because the traditional marriage statutes are not narrowly tailored to the governmental interest at stake so long as sterile and aged heterosexual couples are allowed to partake of civil marriage (as they should be, of course).
The judicial recognition of a suspect classification, in other words, would be based on a very specific phenomneon–the seemingly arbitrary treatment of homosexual couples relative to heterosexual couples. After all, what is more suspect than allowing one kind of procreationless pair to marry while not allowing another kind of procreationless pair to marry? The point is, unlike an approach that relies on the nature of generative acts, as the new natural law does, the idea of an intrinsic capacity to procreate is an effective bar to the creation of a suspect classification for same-sex couples. It removes the suspicion of arbitrariness. It shows same-sex marriage to be not just cognitively mistaken (an error in practical reasoning) but conceptually meaningless.
The appellants’ brief is absolutely right about one thing. The proper test should be the rational-basis one—minimal scrutiny. The people as well as their elected representatives are perfectly reasonable in assuming, on the one hand, that sterile and aged heterosexual couples have an intrinsic or essential capacity to procreate, and on the other hand that lesbian couples have, as an artificial means to an artificial end (as opposed to the natural end of sterile and aged heterosexual couples), an extrinsic or accidental capacity to procreate, and male homosexuals have no sort of capacity to procreate—and lesbian and male homosexual couples can on such grounds be excluded from civil marriage. (This is aside from the problem of the *reductio ad absurdum* which privileges women over men with respect to same-sex marriage.)
I misspoke in the third paragraph from the bottom (previous comment). The traditional marriage statutes are narrowly tailored to the governmental interest at stake so long as sterile and aged heterosexual couples have an intrinsic capacity to procreate.
I strongly disagree with this statement: “Men would come to understand that to have full rights as fathers they must marry before conceiving children”.
Whether parents are married or not should be irrelevant to enforcement of their parental rights.
Families need protection, not marriages. Protecting families will, however, protect families of married couples. The state has no business requiring marriage licenses, regulating, granting tax benefits to, or punishing family members who decide to split up. But it does have a legal duty to ENFORCE the fundamental, constitutional right to be a parent to one’s children. See http://www.childrensjustice.org/cases1.htm
This talk about saving marriage is ridiculous. If you really care about families, use the word FAMILY, not marriage, because not all parents decide to hold themselves out as married, AND SHOULD NOT NEED TO in order for their parental rights to be enforced.
Government officials should never need to utter the words married, marriage, or wedlock, etc. any more than they should use the words Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Catholic, Methodist, or atheist.
See Article, “To Save the FAMILY, Abolish Marriage – as a legal class or status” http://exiledfathers.org/to_save_the_family.htm
Empedocles — I think most of what you said is basically right, except for maybe the last point, and I think it misses my point. I have some difficulty with your biological metaphors for function. My point is that complex things have enough function that it’s meaningless to choose just one — function is contextual, not essential. For instance, take plants which depend on animal digestion for seed dispersal: the function of the fruit of such a plant is at least the result of its evolutionary heritage, and so it serves to protect and nourish seeds as they develop. But also in an important sense their function — also part of its evolutionary heritage — is to be tasty to animals. In the broadest context the fruit’s function is seed dispersal, but plants which don’t bear fruit fulfill this function by other means. And in another context, say in the context of cuisine, the function of fruit is entirely different and depends on the individual characteristics of the fruit and not how or why it developed in the first place. So when I was criticizing your argument, I meant that you’re cherry-picking the context in which the function is defined to the detriment of others.
When it comes to marriage, to say that same-sex marriage makes no sense because it could never fulfill “the” function of marriage — viz. procreation and child-rearing (and I think this is false anyway), to me sounds a little like when some Christians say things like, “Hinduism makes no sense because it can never fulfill the function of religion — salvation through acceptance of Christ.” In order to make that kind of claim you have to deduce an entire system of belief from first principles, and I think where your argument breaks down is when you try to present your particular deductive system regarding marriage as an empirical one backed by biological science, in the face of other important contexts in which marriage functions.
Similarly, I think your point about the justice of exclusion is off the mark. Your army analogy is interesting and cogent, but I think it ultimately fails to prove what you’re trying to make it prove because your syllogism is missing a premise. The reason it’s just to exclude from the army someone who can’t perform the function of being in the army is because it puts others in danger, not because of the function per se. There are plenty of cases where we would not find it just. Take for instance farming. Even a person who can’t fulfill the function of being a farmer (whatever that would be — it’s immaterial) can legally try to be a farmer, and the tax implications of land use would be applicable. The worst that will happen is that the would-be farmer will go bankrupt — it doesn’t put others in immediate danger. The ethics of these things is also situational, not absolute.
CDK:
“I’m not sure why you think the state curbs polyamorous relationships. Perhaps you mean it doesn’t support them through tax breaks or mandatory insurance eligibility.”
Oops, yes you’re absolutely right. I meant “curbs polyamorous marriage.”
“Consent is not the hard and fast line that you think it is. In the case of pederasty and incest, consent can be leveraged or manipulated through gifts, emotional manipulation, or threats. Legal authorities would have a very hard time telling the difference, especially if the very concept of consent is accused of being an arbitrary construct hailing from an antiquated morality. If consent cannot be defined except subjectively, then the presence of an implied contract can be assumed–for instance, if you and your dog have sexual relations.”
I don’t think this is the case. It seems to me reasonable to exclude children (I’m not going to dignify discussion of contract law with regard to animals) from some contracts as incapable of consenting in the first place. They can’t consent to the purchase of a mortgage, say, and I think it’s obvious that sexual and marital relations ought to be included here, too. Although I do find some forms of “traditional marriage,” like childhood betrothal, very interesting in light of these discussions.
“Again, the question is not whether people are kept out of marriage, but under what circumstances and for what reason should they be kept in. I assert that a marriage that is as easily exited as entered is nothing more than cosmetic.”
Would you make exceptions for things like abuse and drug addiction?
As the old Roman Law states: “The chief division of the rights of persons is this: men are all either free or slaves.” Marriage and family are but mere fictions today. Our labor is the property of the state and the state lays claim upon the labor of children at birth. We are not free, and therefore the issue of marriage is bastardized. Marriage today is a fiction, and is nothing more than licensed cohabitation among slaves.
Long ago, no-fault divorce made marriage a sham.
In summary/essence isn’t that all that Mr. Baskerville said here?
And, I couldn’t agree more.
Three great takeaways here:
1. Marriage exists primarily to cement the father to the family.
This should be a fruitful line of argument, if conservatives have the courage to make it. It is true the father is typically the weakest link in the family bond, and this fact should be focussed on, to give the protection of fathers and the father/child bond the priority it deserves. Defenders of real marriage must not be shy at hauling out the stats that show all the pathologies linked to fatherlessness. And we have to hammer home the truth that blood is thicker than water, and that, as a result, even bad (excluding the evil and psychotic) fathers tend to be better than step and surrogate female “fathers”. This will be fiercely resented by the homosexuals, and the bearers of these tidings can be expected to be vilified by queers who will point to how much they love their adopted/artificially inseminated/rent-a-womb products, and who will scream “how dare you question my love”, and “would you rather see this child in an orphanage?” etc., etc. But the facts are on our side, if we will stand up and say them.
2. Marriage—lifelong and protected by a legally enforceable contract—gives us the legal authority and the moral high ground from which to resist encroachments by the state.
Many if not most men don’t need to be convinced of the necessity to roll back state power when it comes to their money and property. What they need convincing of is that they could have a better chance of withstanding the state’s depradations as a member of a traditional household, in which they take their place as head. But this argument will make no impression on men unless it is first instilled in them from an early age that nothing, certainly not material and temporal values such as possessions, property, and career are more valuable and important than having and raising one’s own children. For his children, a real man should be willing to risk all these and more. As more heterosexual men come to take the marriage/children/fatherhood nexus seriously again, the risks to these material and temporal goods can be steadily reduced, if not returned altogether to pre-feminism levels.
3. Men would come to understand that to have full rights as fathers they must marry before conceiving children, and they would thus have an interest in ensuring the institution’s permanence.
The “freedom” of the shack up/hookup life being touted by so many comes at a heavy price. Sneering at the marriage license as merely a “piece of paper”, avoiding marriage on the assumption that one can “fly under the radar” of the state and keep the state out of one’s life only makes one powerless to prevent government from confiscating one’s children. A married man still may have to undergo harassment by government and its aiders and abettors in the legal and psycho/social worker professions, but with the legally enforceable marriage contract at least he stands a chance. But again, it all depends on boys learning that fatherhood is the supreme role for men, something to aspire to, not avoid. Concurrent with this teaching, it must be impressed on them how vulnerable the status of fatherhood is, in these days when the status of the mother has been so unnaturally exalted through he agency of the state.
In our Brave New World, the defense of traditional marriage has to account for cloning–believe it or not. When cloning is used in assisted reproduction (each partner contributing a full 50% of the potential offspring’s genes), same-sex partners still have only an extrinsic rather than intrinsic capacity to procreate. They obviously can’t be said to have an ideal capacity to procreate, and as for an actual capacity, two lesbian partners concededly have an actual capacity to procreate via artifice (cloning technology)—but this is an extrinsic capacity because the end as well as the means is artificial. Two men may also have this extrinsic or accidental capacity to procreate via cloning technology, except that procreation without the ability to nurture the child—to breastfeed it–is Frankensteinish. So we should withhold even the lesser title of extrinsic procreative capacity from men. (It is possible for men to gestate and give birth, but it is extremely dangerous under present technology—it is also perverse, but that is a politically incorrect “value” judgment.)
The difference between sterile and aged opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples is one of natural ends and artificial ends respectively (the capacity to procreate is intrinsic or extrinsic to the teleology of reproduction).Traditional marriage ultimately depends on the assumption that natural procreation is privileged. But constitutionally speaking, this is not important. Liberal and libertarian judges can’t just point to the assumption as a “value-laden” and constitutionally impermissible basis for traditional marriage. Doing so would be tendentious and irrelevant. The only thing that matters is whether an objective difference exists between sterile and aged heterosexual couples and homosexual couples. If there is, on the one hand, an intrinsic capacity to procreate, spelled out in terms of natural ends, and on the other hand an extrinsic capacity to procreate that is spelled out in terms of artificial (non-natural) ends, then there is an objective difference and a bright line that avoids internal inconsistency and validates the status quo of marriage insofar as the very definition of marriage is concerned.
The question of privileging the natural over the artificial and the conventional is something for philosophers to discuss in perpetuity. As far as lawyers and judges are concerned, what matters is the legal plausibility rather than the philosophical validity of the line-drawing. Legally, it makes good sense to draw a line between the natural and the artificial (or the conventional), and the law is capable of making means-ends distinctions as well (i.e., artificial means as distinguished from artificial ends). Voila! Marriage can be tied to procreation without any awkward loose ends (“If sterile and aged couples can marry . . . “), and the law of marriage can, for perfectly sound reasons, be restricted to the union of male and female.
If liberals and libertarians want to make an issue out of the “reification” of the natural in regard to the debate about same-sex marriage, they will be forced to defend the idea that the Constitution is neutral as between the the natural versus the artificial, and they will also have to defend the idea that marriage is socially constructed, with no deeply relevant input from biology. They will end up discrediting not the good old Constitution itself but the “perverted” institution of judicial review. Since the judge-made power of judicial review is absolutely essential to liberals’ and libertarians’ programs of social revolution, they would be shooting themselves in the foot.
The fact is, *judicially-mandated* same-sex marriage will not go over very well with most Americans. If it seems like it might, that is only because a lot of Republican bigwigs have a vested interest in letting it happen, for the future electoral fortunes of their party. Lay low now, tacitly encourage left-leaning judges to get overconfident, then hammer them after the dirty deed (judicially-mandated same-sex marriage from sea to shining sea) with very effective partisan politics aimed at judicial usurpation and tyranny. Neocons especially would seem to have a vested interest in such a strategy–what is good for the electoral fortunes of the Republican Party for years to come will, all things being equal, be good for Israel.
I’m happy to see this article be more direct about the stakes of modern marriage, it skirts around the core issue of this. Why would you encourage men to join in marriage to begin with? Oh sure you can say it’s about helping the children and society but there is a deeper reason you don’t express.
Women are not naturally monogamous, they are naturally hypergamous. Which means they all want to mate with the ‘top dog’ so to speak. In practice this means a woman will happily be the third, fourth, or eight wife of her favorite Hollywood movie star rather than be the first wife of an average man. We already see de-facto harems on our college campuses now and in our ghettos.
Marriage was created by men to force monogamy upon women. Marriage was created as the cornerstone of patriarchy.
Under a system where women got to have their hypergamous choices, most men (who by definition are average) will be disenfranchised from the sexual market place. When a small percent of the men monopolize a majority of the women during their fertile years you leave a large underclass of men who cannot have mates. Remind us again what happens when you have a large population of men who cannot form families : don’t be surprised when they turn to apathy or crime, or revolution.
Monogamous marriage was a truce put into place among men so that the vast majority of men could have a mate. This is what established patriarchy and what can establish patriarchy again.
@ Mark Young, November 24th,
Abolishing marriage is not going to happen and should not happen. As a practical political matter, there will never be enough support for this, for there will always be more people who, as another poster said, cherish getting to call each other wife and husband. And this is about the worst example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater I’ve ever run across. Because marriage has fallen on hard times is no reason to abandon it. You think the courts run roughshod over fathers’ rights now? Wait until you see what happens when the kind of open ended, anarchic menages you advocate become the norm. Government agents will laugh in your face as they haul you away from “your” children. The Bolsheviks encouraged libertinism and open marriage early on and found that they had to reign it back in, but it was too late to prevent the destruction of the parent/child relation. Get married and work on your marriage, not on your court briefs!
No fault (unilateral) divorce effectively destroyed any legal support for the marriage contract. What other contract can you legally break without damages just because you feel like it? Technically no fault divorce is sex neutral, but in practice it favors women. This is shown by the fact that it is women who take the unilateral path of divorce about three quarters of the time and in about 90% of the cases where children are involved.
There are other factors as well which have destroyed traditional marriage legally and severely weakened it otherwise. The legalization, technological improvement, and widespread acceptance of contraception have effectively negated the reproductive purpose of marriage, as is shown by the on-going crash of birth rates on a world-wide basis. Again, in practice unilateral contraception favors women and socially it’s considered a right for women, but an obligation for men. The follow-up legalization of abortion doesn’t even pretend to be sex neutral and the advanced reproductive technologies make traditional procreation itself unnecessary – children can just be manufactured as needed. And the ruling elites have decided and indoctrinated their subjects to agree that not many children, indeed not many people, are needed.
Finally (and now I’m going to really go into politically incorrect territory) the removal of the spousal exemption from anti-rape laws, has placed sex within marriage on the exact same basis as any one night stand. And here again you have anti-male laws fraudulently masquerading as sex neutral.
So if marriage has nothing to do with children, permanence or even sex, any other restriction is bound to be arbitrary. Why restrict it to same sex couples? Hell, why restrict it to couples at all? Why not have group marriages, large or small, that individual members could unilaterally opt out of. After all, the only possible reason for getting legally married would be to get financial benefits which are equally arbitrary.
The two main results of this great social experiment, unprecedented in the history of the world, will be a severe population crash and the end of civilization in favor of primitive savagery. Children as a manufactured commodity will never be able to compete with other goods; they’re too much of a hassle. And men, denied the civilizing responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood, will revert, indeed are already reverting, to sexual and other predation. Legalization of gay marriage in an environment where legal marriage has ceased to mean much of anything, is simply a symptom rather than a cause of the mortal crisis civilization is undergoing.
The strongest protection a family can have is from that class of father that has been elevated – through the institution of marriage, or, better yet, through the sacrament of Holy Matrimony, to the status of husband – a status that cannot be conferred any other way. Only strong, legally privileged husbands can have a chance of protecting their children.
To abandon marriage so as to concentrate on protecting the illegitimate or divorce-riven family is immoral and ludicrous on its face; in tactical terms, it amounts to giving up a still defensible, though beleaguered, position and the great, though wounded, champion therein (the husband) for an easily overrun position in which the soldiers have mutinied against and unmanned their natural leaders (those whom they haven’t imprisoned or run off).
It is the cohabiters and other varieties of fornicators, and their allies in the lavender mafia, who attempt to “hold themselves out” as something they are not, i.e., who pretend to be as good as married, who don’t “care about families”. Attacking those who try to do the right thing is simply an attempt to deflect attention away from their own wrongdoing.
Another Matt, Thanks for your thoughtful reply. But there are a few points of my argument that you are misunderstanding. I am not saying anything like the example you give (“Hinduism makes no sense because it can never fulfill the function of religion — salvation through acceptance of Christ.”) but rather saying that someone who claims that the function of the brain is to cool the body, or that the function of screwdrivers is to do laundry, or the function of the police is to put out fires is just flat out wrong. It is not a matter of context but a plain old objective fact of the matter what a things function is (of course a thing may have multiple functions, and it may sometimes be difficult to tell what a things function is since function is a matter of history).
Your farmer example is interesting but besides the point. Your argument is that only where someone is harmed by someones inability to perform a function do we allow them to be excluded. But we could justifiably exclude someone from being, say, a computer programmer if they could not perform that function, even though no one would be harmed if he failed to perform his function. The excluded programmer can not claim unjust discrimination if he can’t perform the function of computer programmers. You might reply that the business that employs him is being harmed, in this case, but this only puts the argument back a step. If we want to say that the business is being harmed it is because it can not perform ITS function, of selling goods and services. In the army example I gave, the reason we can exclude someone from joining the infantry is because it prevents the infantry from performing ITS function, which depends on its members performing their function. So again, it is the inability to perform a function that is the question. We call it a form of harm to be prevented from performing a function.
Suppose our “farmer” instead of planting and harvesting crops, started building cars. Would he be a farmer? Even if he insisted on being called a farmer? Even if we humored him and called him farmer, he would not therefore be a farmer. Gay marriage would be like humoring this car-maker by calling him a farmer.
Mr. Higdon, November 28th,
Great comment. Your insight into and info on no-fault divorce have sharpened my appreciation of the evil inherent in this legal monstrosity. Likewise, I hadn’t noticed the anti-male bias in attitudes toward artificial contraception; the difference between the perceived “right” to it (for females) versus an obligation to use it (for males) does indeed relegate men to an inferior position.
I was also impressed with your courage for venturing into the extremely hostile territory of the removal of the spousal exemption from prosecution for rape. This does indeed place marital relations on the same legal basis as a romp with a bar pickup, and could only have had a cynicalizing effect on men, while contributing to the flight from marriage. It brings to mind the hapless lawmaker who was heard to lament, when this law was put before him to sign, “If you can’t rape your wife, who can you rape?”, and who ever after has been held up as “proof” of the perfidy lurking just beneath the surface of all men. I don’t claim to know what he was trying to say, but I’m willing to bet he had sensed that once a man can be accused of raping his wife, he can be accused of almost anything, and that his freedom from here on would be at the sufferance of judges. Which has, of course, proved to be the case.
Baskerville is absolutely dead on with his critique. Having spent the better part of the last decade wandering though the wilderness of a nasty custody battle, I have a much better picture of what the problems are and how we need to deal with them.
There is a growing understanding by many in the Anglosphere is that part of the solution lies in what is called “shared equal parenting”. Several governments, including a province in Canada and one in Australia have already passed legislation that is helping solve the issue. Basically what SEP laws do is presume that both parents will have shared custody in the event that they do not live together. This will end the constant jockeying for power and custody that occurs when one parent (almost always the mom) declares that they are the primary parent and thereby relegating the other to a support role (read money).
Needless to say, feminists are on their hind legs braying about how awful this is for the children when of course, what they cannot say is that it is bad for them. SEP is a master stroke in that not only does it help men with custody but it no longer puts them in a position where they are looked at that the sole source of financial support because the women are free to persue earning a living rather than being chained to the child 100% of the time.
Once the flow of money from men to women is stopped things, will change, and probably in a hurry.
“So again, it is the inability to perform a function that is the question. We call it a form of harm to be prevented from performing a function.”
I think this is the key point you’d have to defend. There are two consequences this logic requires you hold with regard to gay marriage:
1) Gay marriages cannot perform the function of marriage.
2) Gay union masquerading as marriage hurts the institution of marriage by not allowing it to perform ITS function.
The first is plausible, but for all the reasons I’ve laid out I think it’s untenable — most importantly because “the” function of marriage is not an empirical matter nor is it something that can be reasoned axiomatically, unless you’re willing to claim that every cultural manifestation of marriage but one was wrong. This would include all marriages where women were given as de facto property from father to son-in-law, or those where the function was to cement family alliance. This would include all marriages that occur between septuagenarian widow and widower, where the function of the marriage is not to die alone and unhappy. My argument is that intention and context matter, and to pull out one function to the detriment of all the others in fact reduces the cultural richness associated with marriage. It may be true that some marriages can and do perform ALL the functions, but we have not found it unjust to allow marriages which can only, for whatever reason, perform only a subset.
When you talk about allowing gay marriage as a kind of humoring, you’re saying that of the functions of marriage — at least 1) producing biological offspring, 2) raising children together, 3) producing a stable and loving family relationship, 4) to provide the individuals in the marriage the satisfaction of commitment, 5) meaningful participation in society and its expectations, etc. only 1) matters, the others are incidental, and any couple that gets married because they explicitly want to fulfill the latter 4 but are incapable of, hostile to, or even neutral about the first are deluding themselves in thinking that what they have is a marriage or that their reasons for getting married were not in fact actually reasons. I don’t buy it, and I think it’s clear that gay couples can perform ALL FUNCTIONS OF MARRIED COUPLES except the one biological one.
Having said all of that, I think the second point is even harder to defend, and that’s the only one which matters when one wants to talk about the justice (the justice, not the wisdom or the morality or whatever) — the justice of denying the institution of marriage to whatever group. It seems to me like a whole lot of unnecessary anthropomorphizing of the institution first off. Worse though, I think it commits a familiar fallacy of division if it is to be taken seriously in terms of justice — you’d have to not only prove that gay marriage injured the institution of marriage, but that in so doing, other individual marriages were also injured. Institutions like this are emergent, bottom-up things — they do not have wills of their own even in idealized form.
In other words, you’d have to prove that it caused other individual married couples not to be able to fulfill one or more of the functions of marriage. The only way I could see this happening (and I’m willing to concede that perhaps I don’t have a fertile enough imagination to think of other examples) would be the feeling someone gets when an undesirable party moves into the house next door in a gated community (who let THEM in?)… but this example seems to underscore bigotry rather than justice, and I’d like to do this without accusing anyone of bigotry. (I also feel bad that none of this really addresses the arguments in the article itself, which I still think is basically consistent in its own way, but really bizarre and unjust… and in a lot of ways deeply unconservative in its emphasis on the purpose and demands of the institution rather than the will of its participants.)
Another Matt, I was hoping not to have to go into an in-depth discussion of modern philosophical understandings of teleology here on an Internet message board, but you are such a perceptive critic and so able to perceive possible implications of my argument that you force me. I have been using “function” in what is known as the etiological sense. This was the approach pioneered by Wright but really developed by Ruth Millikan. Millikan calls her account of function “proper functions” to distinguish it from other senses the word “function” may have (but I’ll just use the word “function” for simplicity). An etiological function (and there are several different accounts out there that differ in details) at least must have two features 1. it must be a copy of a previous item 2. it must be selected rather than things missing the feature because the feature produces some effect. Genes, for example, are copies of ones parents’ genes, and the genes that produce hearts are selected by natural selection because they produce hearts. Hearts are produced by natural selection because they pump blood, not because they make a “lub-dub” sounds, or squish when they are stepped on, or freeze when put into liquid nitrogen, or any of a million other things. Screwdrivers can do a million things, but they are copied from blueprints or a prototype in manufacturing for their ability to turn screws. I can use a screwdriver to do many things other than turn screws, but turning screws is its function. (Actually, it is its “direct” function as opposed to “derived” functions but I don’t think I’ll have to get into that distinction for this present purpose). Your example of using a marriage to cement family alliance is like using a screwdriver for something other than turning screws. Behaviors have a function in this sense as well. Animal mating displays have the function of attracting mates. That is what previous mating displays did that resulted in the genes that produce that dance being copied into successive generations. Learned behavior can have a function too. Each time I switch on a light I am copying a previous behavior for a reason, to illuminate the room. That is the function of light-switch-flipping behavior.
And so the possession of a function is an empirical matter. It is a matter of possession a certain history of copying from previous ancestors for a specific reason. And so I hope you will entertain the possibility that marriages have been reproduced for a reason and so have a function, and this is just as much an empirical matter as in these other examples. Mating displays that don’t attract mates go extinct, but marriages keep getting reproduced. What recurring problem do they solve? Because gay relationships can not produce a child and hetero relationships can, there are problems that need to be prevented in the case of a hetero relationship that are absent in a gay relationship, namely, the problem of producing a child as a result of sexual intercourse. Thus an institution needs to exist in the case of hetero relationships whose purpose is the prevention of the problems created in a world where children are produced and not provided for by their parents. This institution does not need to exist in the case of gay relationships because there is no such problem to be avoided.
Now, your second point on whether the institution of marriage is harmed by allowing gays to marry. If we agree that a business can be “harmed” by allowing a computer programmer who can not program computers, “harm” just means in this context “can not perform its function of programming computers and so prevents the further function of maximizing profits.” So to “harm” marriage just means “can not perform its function of caring for ones children that are produced as a result of sexual intercourse.” In this sense, a broken toaster has been “harmed.” There is no anthropomorphizing going on, as long as it is understood that “harm” has more than one sense, or is being used metaphorically. I only have to show that gay marriage “harms” the institution of marriage in this sense (can not perform function), which I have done. But then why can’t we exclude from farming your poor farmer? Your previous farmer example played on confusing the distinction between unable to perform a function and performing a different function. I tried to bring this out in discussing the “farmer” who made cars. Your original farmer could not perform the function of farmer because he did not possess the virtues that make a good farmer, but farming was still the function. The car-making “farmer”, on the other hand was not being a bad farmer, but was being something else entirely. Gay marriage, were it allowed, would be like the car-making “farmer” it exists from some entirely different purpose other than marriage. They are certainly not marrying to prevent the problems that might result from their sexual intercourse. The bad farmer could and probably should be excluded from farming by his boss: himself. He’s a bad boss in addition to a bad farmer. If he had a different boss he probably would be excluded from farming, and no one could claim unjust discrimination.
Since Baskerville brought up Stephanie Coontz, I’ll just put it out there that her book,
“Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage” is a fascinating historical analysis of marriage as we westerners have experienced it for five thousand years, and a glimpse at how marriage has developed in other cultures.
The premise for marriage for the first 4,800 years was really entirely different than it’s been these last hundred and fifty or so years. NOW marriage is based on romantic love. But THEN it was a vehicle to strengthen ties with other families, clans, towns and countries. THEN marriage protected and increased a family’s realty and wealth. THEN marriage extended the lineage for another generation. Marriage THEN was essential for most people to have a living.
Women brought real and tangible value to the marriage through their dowry, their skills and their ability to bear children. Though not “equal” in political terms, wives were certainly highly valued, and equal contributors to the wealth and stability of the marriage they entered into.
But these premises for marriage changed towards the romantic view that people should marry for love. Unfortunately, when love is the only reason for marriage, then lack of love becomes the reason for a marriage’s dissolution. Depending on the definition one uses for love, and the maturity of one’s character, many marriages and divorces may be in that person’s future.
Actually, it’s just easier to not get married!
And that’s what’s happening. Even though we are currently going through the throes of trying to define marriage, the fact is, Coontz points out, the west is making another major shift in its approach. It’s not towards gay marriage, or polygamy, or polyamory, or incest, or whatever else. It’s towards not marrying at all, and raising families together (Brad and Angelina) without marrying. Tax breaks? Not for much longer. Insurance breaks? Will become obsolete. Social Security benefits? Who are we kidding. Social Security is bankrupt.
Marriage will likely not disappear in this or the next generation. But if the big picture trend continues….marriage will not be that much of an issue.
Fascinating book. I’m glad I read it.
In my set of college educated, fairly well paid professionals, marriages almost always were followed within a year or two with children. Sure, there may be other reasons people get married, but even among the ‘progressives’, reproduction is number one with several bullets.
Moreover the marriage of past fertility people is much less celebrated (think Charles and what-her-name versus Charles and Dianna) and at least preserves the form of marriage.
Finally, Matt, marriage is not all about you. Marriage is a legal/societal state. It is not ‘guys, she’s not just my girlfriend anymore’ — that statement only matters to your circle of friends and acquaintances. Marriage is about reproducing a society, a necessary function which extends far beyond your own circle. Homosexual marriage flies in the face of that most important function (which, btw, is also tightly correlated with ‘raising of children’ and ‘producing a stable family’)
One interesting note on gay marriage is that if there are children involved, one parent by definition, cannot be the biological parent and perhaps both. This will put an additional monkey wrench in those dissolutions.
Gay marriage is coming along at a time when biological parents (fathers in particular) are beginning to gain new leverage in ways they could not have before. DNA testing, gender neutral legislation supporting “equality”, and women earning an income outside the home, open adoptions, greater acceptance of men raising children, etc. are making it more difficult to Ace the biological father out of custody and money. This means that the equilibrium between men and women is balancing out whereas gay marriages the opposite will occur.
I think that there is an upcoming clash between the proponents of same sex marriage and biological parents rights that will become inevitable. We know what happens to non-custodial parents and their relationship with their “children” after a divorce. Gays will have incentives for the reasons I mentioned to try and weaken biological parents rights and visa versa with gays and lesbians ultimately on the losing end. It is not that I begrudge gays / lesbians from having custody or that they cannot be good parents but that they should not encroach on my rights as a biological parent.
I made a mistake when I said that two lesbian partners may have, via cloning, an actual capacity to procreate (albeit, as I correctly said, an extrinsic kind isolated from the teleology of reproduction). A little reflection shows that they surely do not have such a capacity if sterile opposite-sex couples have only an ideal capacity to procreate. An extrinsic capacity to procreate cannot be an ideal or actual capacity, which only opposite-sex couples have.
The bottom line is that, with respect to the meaning and nature of marriage, same-sex couples are simply not in the same boat as fertile and infertile opposite-sex couples. The fact of procreation, properly understood, provides a solid and immovable foundation for exclusively opposite-sex marriage.
->Now, your second point on whether the institution of marriage is harmed by allowing gays to marry. If we agree that a business can be “harmed” by allowing a computer programmer who can not program computers, “harm” just means in this context “can not perform its function of programming computers and so prevents the further function of maximizing profits.”<-
See, I don't think this is the right analogy at all. From my perspective, if you wanted to be honest about amorphous and emergent (and therefore will-free) systems like marriage AS AN INSTITUTION your argument should sound a lot more like, "If we agree that the field of computer programming is 'harmed' by allowing a computer programmer who can not program computers, 'harm' just means in this context 'the computer programming field can not perform its function of programming computers and so prevents the further function of maximizing profits for companies."
Of course the field will get on fine whether or not this person is allowed to program computers. It wouldn't make sense to hire him. Let's say that his ultimate reason for choosing to program computers was because he wanted to pick up a nerd girlfriend — I still don't think this would affect the justice of whether or not to allow him to try. And then let's say he had all the knowledge of algorithms and program structure required of a programmer, but due to an astigmatism and dyslexia he can't do the actual programming at the computer for the spate of syntax errors he makes — maybe it doesn't make sense to hire him, but I don't think it would be just to not allow him to call himself a programmer. This metaphor probably doesn't extend too much further, but this kind of description sounds to me a lot more apt. In sum, if your arguments about marriage serving to perform the function of "caring for ones children that are produced as a result of sexual intercourse," you're simply going to have to extend that to infertile couples because they can't care for any children that are going to be produced as a result of their intercourse. It's fine if this is also "not a marriage" as far as philosophy or religion is concerned, but as far as the state is concerned it obviously doesn't work.
Maybe this is where the article comes back in to our side chat — if marriage as an institution were performing its function in toto, then young pregnant girls would not be giving their children up for adoption, there would be no reason for granting anyone — infertile couples or gays — adoption privileges except in really exceptional circumstances, and so the whole purpose of marriage is preserved and therefore it's just to let the ones who can't mate "off the marriage team." I think this kind of reasoning is begging the question though: "We must not let gays (and to be consistent, infertiles) marry and raise adopted children, because if they are allowed to, it means that a child is not going to be raised by its biological parents, who should be married in the first place if marriage is doing its job." Well, duh — but the reasoning is circular and meaningless.
Another Matt, Empedocles,
Enough with the functions, and the infertiles, and the broken toasters! The function of these arguments, besides boring me to tears, is to disarm oneself before the enemy and give him/her/it the initiative. Marriage has achieved its privileged status because it has been the repository of the hopes and dreams of the overwhelming majority of mankind, who naturally want to create an especially secure environment in which to bring forth children. The rest is a lot of stuff and bother and worse, a waste of time, and meanwhile our position is steadily undermined. And worrying about the trivial – bigotry! – when an evil is being perpetrated is insane. Bigotry – intolerance of a different opinion – doesn’t go far enough, in any case, because the enemy here is past the opinion stage and well into the operational stage. What is needed is to get angry! Another Matt refers to “the feeling someone gets when an undesirable party moves into the house next door in a gated community (who let THEM in?)…” This is precisely the correct, natural and necessary feeling, and I can personally attest, as someone who suffered the effects of forced integration in the 50′s, to how nightmarish it will be for those left behind in the “old neighborhood” of traditional marriage once the barbarians move next door. Gay “marriage” perpetrates home invasion on traditional marriage by cheapening and mocking it. Yet now, to satisfy the egoistic cravings of 1% or 2% of the population for something that they are eminently unqualified for, we are supposed to make nice while rubbing shoulders at the PTA, ballpark, etc., with women who act like husbands and men who act like wives. They act out their grotesque burlesque of the roles that belong to us and we are supposed to smile and shuffle and say yes, ma’am, or else master in a black robe will convict us of a hate crime. And what about those who might have contemplated marriage, perhaps including one of your children, who will now turn away from it as its status sinks in tandem with its ever-lowering bar to entry? This will result in more illegitimate children growing up amid a passing parade of live-in boyfriends and girlfriends and whatevers instead of one father and one mother. Is this an acceptable price to pay so that Tom and Dick can call themselves Mr. and Mrs. Tom and Dick? Of course not!
Stand up and denounce these people as the fornicators, perverts and impostors they are! Refuse to have anything to do with them! Do not let your children play with the children from these swamps! For a while yet, we will still be the majority, and while numbers are on our side, the gloves must come off and the real fight must begin.
->Gay “marriage” perpetrates home invasion on traditional marriage by cheapening and mocking it. <-
Yep. Precisely the type of anthropomorphizing the entire institution I'm talking about. When and individual gay relationship perpetrates "home invasion" on another individual marriage, maybe then we can talk, but the rest is nonsense.
[...] his recent blog post over at The American Conservative, Stephen Baskerville challenges defenders of marriage to admit, [...]
“When and individual gay relationship perpetrates “home invasion” on another individual marriage, maybe then we can talk, but the rest is nonsense.”
Apparently you haven’t heard of metaphor. The phrase “home invasion” is a metaphor; as such it operates under the poetic license. If you and your wife have children someday, and you are forced to associate, as equals, at school, birthday parties, and anywhere else activities occur on a family basis, with the gay “marrieds” in your new circle, you will have had your home, which includes much more than your physical house, invaded. You have not refuted the truth in that statement by merely reclassifying it as “anthropomorphizing”.
Earlier you wrote: “But that I get to call her my wife and she gets to call me her husband, and that other people recognize that as a commitment, is what is important.” Once the Toms and Dicks get to call each other husband and wife, you will see that people no longer make such a recognition.
[...] at the magazine The American Conservative, college professor Stephen Baskerville argues that defenders of traditional marriage need to rethink the arguments they have been offering up to [...]
A marriage, does not cement a man to his family, obviously. If it did, the divorce rate would not be what it is. Frankly, permitting gay marriage, if anything would help continue the institution of marriage. What creates a strong family is a proper upbringing with involved parents. Too often these days, parents rely on the schools to raise their kids, and unfortunately children learn bad habit from each other, after all they’re kids. When parent start taking responsibility for their children and instilling proper values, we will see the next generation embrace marriage and stay married.